(Hopefully) Useful Information
        
Data Sources
RF
DSP
Software
Linux
Windows
Hardware
Amateur Radio
Test Equipment
Life

Data Sources

Nationmaster and Statemaster are excellent sources of basic statistical data.

AnyWho is a source of phone numbers and related data like reverse lookups.   Linc Madison tells all about North American area codes and numbering plans.

FCC ULS (Universal Licensing System) and ASR (Antenna Structure Regitstration) Database search pages

RF

Microwaves 101 is a very practical and useful RF and microwave site.

DSP

DSP Guru is hosted by iowegian, a maker of DSP filter design and FFT software.

Software

Python is rapidly becoming my favorite utility language

Linux

Debian is the distribution I prefer.

Windows

WinSCP is hands-down the best SCP/SFTP/FTP tool I've found for Windows. Even better, it's fully open source and free.

PuTTY is a great cross platform (win/mac/*nix) client package for SSH, SCP , SFTP, as well as things you shouldn't be using like Telnet and FTP. It has a very good SSH authentication agent in the form of Pageant.

NoteTab is a really good and simpe text editor that comes in three grades. I use the light (freeware) version for a lot of my note taking and text cleanup. They offer several more capable versions that I'm tempted to buy.

Irfanview is a lightning fast image viewer. That's it - but it will view most any image format known. It'll also let you translate between formats and do some limited scaling and processing. And it's free.

PureText is one of those things you probably never knew you needed. It removes formatting from data you are cutting and pasting. I'm forever cutting text from documents or spreadsheets. It's great that windows carries formatting along by default, but I almost never want it. PureText lets me set up a hotkey that lets me paste unformatted text regardless of the source formating. If you do much document editing you want this and may not even know it. It's free, so it's easy to try.

Multimon Taskbar puts taskbars/toolbars on your additional monitors. When you drag an app to an alternate monitor you get a taskbar button for it on that monitor's taskbar. Even better, it gives you buttons next to the minimize/maximize/close buttons on that window that let you move a window to the other monitors. You are running more than one monitor, right? If you aren't I really suggest that you dust that old monitor off and give it a try. Oscar has free and more capable paid versions.

Hardware  

Mikrotik for small, cost effective network hardware. I'm still wonder why Latvia ended up with so many network hardware companies.


Amateur Radio

Kent Britain's (WA5VJB) PCB Antennas


Test Equipment

KO4BB's Manuals, Timing, Ham Radio, Test Equipment Website Didier Juges tremendous public resource of (mostly test equipment) manuals, Amateur (Ham) radio - and not so amateur radio as well, and extremely accurate time and frequency measurement (Time Nuttery)

The BoatAnchor Manual Archive BAMA is a wonderful repository of vintage electronics data and manuals.


Life

The Blame Displacement Form  [BDF]

When I left Southwest Research Institute in January 1996 I knew that I would need to launch a premptive strike to make a clean getaway.  Given the time honored tradition that the last person to leave an organization becomes responsible for everything that goes wrong, I figured that I'd formalize the process.The Blame Displacement Formresulted.  Someone scanned and forwarded it to a friend.  It developed a life of it's own, and I've gotten email from people in something like 150 countries.  You can get a PDF here (about 40 Kilobytes)

Some days you're the bug, and some days you're the windshield.

A mildly funny experience setting up a 58 Ghz Microwave link


 

My life on April 1st, 2000

A much funnier first day back at the office.


25 Aug 18